Mother Jones has jumped on Obama for what may be the first “reneged promise” of his campaign: assigning a windfall tax to the profits raked in by Big Oil. According to MJ blogger Nick Baumann, a transition team staffer:

The President-elect’s transition team hasn’t explicitly announced it will drop the windfall tax plan, but a transition aide, commenting on the condition he not be identified, backed off the promise in an email. “President-elect Obama announced the [windfall profits tax] policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel,” he said. “They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that.”

Advocacy groups like the American Small Business League—which noticed almost immediately when the discussion of windfall taxes was removed from Obama’s Web site—are bemoaning the fallen tax as a disappointment, while economists (and common sense) note that it now seems far less necessary given that it would bring in substantially less money today than four months ago.

Still, the fact that this debate has arisen at all, before Obama has even taken office, is a testament to the dangers (or maybe just necessary consequences) of using technology for increased government transparency.

Watchdog groups can now police the Internet for early indications of a policy change, and leap on something as (seemingly) small as a single proposal to publicize a decision from the administration. Of course, the fact that Obama’s people are promptly removing now-dead proposals from the site in the first place is a pretty reassuring testament to the operation’s integrity as a whole.

Comments (118)

If there are no windfall profits, what will the Windfall Profits Tax tax? What large corporation could not disappear at will any volume of net retained earnings? Hollywood does it all the time and nobody says “boo” (except for Sean Connery who tore a certain studio a new one for not paying him earnings based upon revenues).

How convenient for a broken campaign promise to turn into: i) common sense, ii)dangers of technology/transparency, iii)operational integrity, and iv) a seemingly small proposal (that angry people clung to and voted for O as a result of). That is certainly turning a frog into a prince.

Oil is a essentially a fixed margin business. The % does not change, the absolute dollars do based on volume. Saudi charges more for a barrel, oil co makes more earnings on that higher cost. So now O is saying that the oil companies are not making enough profits. Is this same rationale going to apply to “small businesses” when determining when they can afford to pay for O’s healthcare plan? Who are these people and how do they determine this? Do they sit in ivory towers in the clouds? Therein lies the danger of the all-knowing left.

I thought the whole WPT concept was grossly stupid. The government tax on fuel exceeds the oil companies profits in percentage terms. Who is gouging whom?

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